Drafts 4.3

A great update to Drafts was released earlier this week, and it's got some interesting changes for users who manage a lot of notes or save bits of text in the same notes on a regular basis.

The Drafts extension can now offer to append/prepend whatever it receives (some text, a URL, etc.) to existing notes – useful to keep a running list of items without ending with multiple notes or having to merge them manually every time. This is useful for me when I want to assemble lists of links I can use for MacStories or Relay.

The Drafts Share extension (used from the Share sheet in other apps) now supports appending and prepending to inbox drafts as well as capture of new drafts. To use these options in the share sheet, tap the “Append” or “Prepend” buttons at the bottom of the window and select the draft to add the text to.

You can also run an action on multiple notes at once now:

When using the “Select” and “Operations” options below the drafts list, there is now a “Select All” option to quickly select all drafts in the current tab, and a “Run Action” operation to apply an action to multiple drafts. “Select All” is particularly useful to quickly archive all drafts in the inbox, for example. The “Run Action” operation lets you quickly select multiple drafts and run an action on them. When selecting this operation, the action list will be shown to select the action to run. Some actions (such as ones that leave Drafts) are not supported for multiple selections and will be grayed out in the list.

The most impressive aspect of Drafts is how Greg Pierce manages to keep the app simple and powerful at the same time with features that are there but not in the way. That's an exercise of restraint and good design that can't be appreciated in other apps. Drafts is $9.99 on the App Store.